Webmin is a fantastic tool for those willing to administer UNIX or unix-like systems through a GUI interface. While the CLI interface lets any user to interact with these kind of systems to the very core and extract all the juice, there are tasks where the graphical interface makes sense and its visual and quick […]
How to install Webmin on FreeBSD 12
How to install RKHunter on FreeBSD
In this post you will find simple instructions to install rkhunter on FreeBSD which is a root kit “hunter” so your system/s will have some security in place for that kind of unwanted software. But for those who do not know what a rootkit is, let’s give it a simple definition (which you can get […]
How to mitigate/solve the MDS vulnerabilities of Intel processors in FreeBSD
It had to happen again. Anyone betting on new hardware vulnerabilities on Intel processors would have won. This time these are called the MDS vulnerabilities, which stands for Microarchitectural Data Sampling. The trouble is the ones who would have really made big money would have been those stating the new CPUs were on the same […]
How to install the FAMP stack
You may have heard of the LAMP stack which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP or Perl. This is the same but instead of using the GNU/Linux operating system we’ll use FreeBSD. This is the FAMP stack. There are two ways to install software in FreeBSD, packages and the ports collections. Which in the […]
How to enable log rotation on FreeBSD
This is a very short simple entry but it may help you. As many others you may be running a web server, or any other service that creates some logging information. Enable log rotation on FreeBSD will keep those log files in a manageable size (at least more readable) and they won’t grow and expand […]
How to upgrade FreeBSD from version 11.2 up to 12.0
Although the upgrade process is very well described on the FreeBSD handbook you may be looking for a more detailed hands on how to upgrade FreeBSD from version 11.2 up to 12.0 article. We’re going work here on this process, step by step detailing not only how to upgrade but to do it safely. First […]
How to detect a WAF – Web Application Firewall
From a penetration testing perspective to identify if a Web Application Firewall (WAF) is in place is essential. The next question is, does an administrator need to know this? My view is, anyone who is in charge of any system that has implemented some sort of WAF needs to verify this tool is working, at […]
FreeBSD particularities
As some others unix-like operating systems FreeBSD has some particularities aside to the UNIX heritage, licensing and the like. The init system is the way a system starts up and the BSD has always been different. If you happen to be a UNIX admin I am sure you are aware of this and the folks […]
The root account
Users. What the hell you mean by “root”? Are you a Windows user? I bet you have the user account badly configured. By default Windows is installed under the Administrator account. And nobody bothers to change this and add a second account. That second account should be an underprivileged one. If you own the computer […]
How to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown on a Lenovo T430s laptop with Ubuntu
As recently announced in a previous article I wanted to write a couple of guides on how to mitigate Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in GNU/Linux and UNIX environments. It is always a good and I hope a standard practice to have your systems patched and if they aren’t for whatever the reason (that legacy thing […]